Despite the shadow of immorality, breakthroughs in air-conditioning developed out of desperation. Doctors scrambling to heal the sick took particular interest. In 1851, a Florida doctor named John Gorrie received a patent for the first ice machine. According to Salvatore Basile, the author of Cool: How Air-Conditioning Changed Everything, Gorrie hadn’t initially sought to invent such an apparatus. He’d been trying to alleviate high fevers in malaria patients with cooled air. To this end, he designed an engine that could pull in air, compress it, then run it through pipes, allowing the air to cool as it expanded. [...]
Two decades after Garfield’s death, Willis Carrier coined the term “air-conditioning.” Although it wasn’t an overnight sensation, Carrier’s breakthrough came in July 1902, when he designed his Apparatus for Treating Air, first installed in the Sackett Williams Publishing building in Brooklyn, New York. The device blew air over tubes containing a coolant. Its purpose was to reduce humidity more than to reduce air temperature; excess water in the air warped the publishing house’s paper. [...]
Air-conditioning’s major public debut was at the 1939 World’s Fair. Carrier hosted the Carrier Igloo of Tomorrow expo, where 65,000 visitors would experience air-conditioning for the first time, boosting consumer interest. Over the next decade, as the air conditioner shrank in size, advertisements for the machine shifted their appeals from men in the workplace to women at home. In some early ads the air conditioner sits in the window among a proud family admiring their machine like a spacecraft that had landed in the living room. [...]
Even though refrigerants have been modified to use fluorine instead of chlorine, and thereby to avoid impacting ozone, air-conditioning still exerts enormous environmental impact. According to Daniel Morrison, the acting deputy director of communications at the U.S. Department of Energy, residential and commercial buildings used more than 500 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity for air-conditioning in 2015 alone. That’s almost 20 percent of the total electricity used in buildings, amounting to $60 billion in electricity costs annually. Air-conditioning is also one of the main contributors to peak electric power demand, one symptom of which is rolling summer blackouts.
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